Have you paid attention to your keywords? Do you want your website to appear on the first page of Google for a specific search term? Preparation: It's not easy if it's not Wikipedia or the New York Times. But it is not impossible.
Ranking for keywords in organic search is an iterative process. 100% of the time the expected result is not achieved. Taking content marketing and SEO seriously can make things happen, especially when it comes to new websites trying to rank for popular keywords. Rankings, traffic, sales, etc
Here are 10 steps to ranking for your keywords on Google.
Step 1: Set up the foundation
This is actually a step before the first step. Before you can expect to rank well in Google for random keywords, you need to know some basics. These prerequisites are:
Strong Website – The longer a website is and the more credibility and links it accumulates, the better. It's also important that your entire site follows SEO best practices. If you're not sure what that means, start with Google Webmaster's Guide.
Existing Networks – To rank quickly for keywords, it is very helpful to have an internal network to share new content with. This includes blog followers, social media audiences like Facebook and Twitter, and contact emails. I need occasional help with links. If you don't know what that means, it's time to think of link building as relationship building.
Don't be too hasty about such things in the race for Internet gold. If it doesn't work the first time, you should try again later.
Step 2: Do some basic keyword research
You may think you know the keywords you want to target, but check your gut. Before finalizing your keyword selection, use several keyword tools to understand your keyword's search volume and competition. Key considerations include:
Choose keywords with high volume but not too much – In general, you don't want to target keywords with low relative search volume when there are equivalent terms that are more popular. For example, usually
Choose keywords that are relevant to your business model - If the keywords are relevant to your site and business, you are more likely to be successful in ranking for keywords. It also increases your chances of making real profit from the rankings. Keep in mind that rankings themselves aren't worth anything unless they generate valuable traffic or leads. For example, a party planning business might target "how to cook a party," but "how to cook rice" isn't really relevant to them or their target audience.
At this point in the process, you should also create a list of close variants of your main keyword. These will help you create and optimize your content later.
Use WordStream's free keyword tool to find the most valuable keywords to rank for.
Step 3: Check the match
Once you have your keywords, search Google and some other search engines to see what your competitors are doing right now.
Domains and URLs – How many domains match exactly? Do all top 10 URLs contain your keywords?
Title – How do you put your keywords in your title tag?
Ranked content type – product pages? Blog posts? video?
Types of businesses ranked – are they giant brands or small businesses? news site?
Credibility of those sites – Use the plugin to see the age of the top 10 sites, link profile size and more.
You have to do at least as much as your competitors to beat them. Ideally, we should do more and do better.
Step 4: Consider the intention
The more specific your keywords are (think long tail keywords), the easier it is to target your searchers and give them what they're likely looking for. In search marketing, "intent" is the best guess at what the person using the search query actually wants. Consider the following keywords. Note that as you go down the list, it is much easier to guess the target from the words alone.
- Glasses
- Glasses
- Discounted glasses
- Cheap glasses frames
- Cheap children's glasses frames
Ask yourself what type of content works best for your keywords. In this case, it is obvious that there will be a selection of children's glasses for sale. From the first semester onwards, you don't even know if the person is looking for glasses or glasses. Even in the latter case, one may only be looking for a picture of the glasses. I have no clear intention to buy. Ecommerce businesses almost always try to rank for business keywords.
The founder of Google said that a perfect search engine only provides one result. We want to be the only result that meets the searcher's needs so they don't go back to search results for better answers.
Step 5: Conceptualize your content
Then come up with a plan for the actual content you're going to create. Hopefully this will rank for your chosen keyword. There are many ways to rank for keywords, including:
- Article
- blog post
- Product page
- List or list of links (links to other pages on the site or web)
- Authentic guide
- infographic
- video
How long does content creation take? Who should create it? Is it all done in-house or do we outsource it? Content like infographics and videos require more resources. The best way to answer your search query is to use a tool like a mortgage calculator. In this case, engineering resources are required.
Step 6: Run
Here the tire meets the road surface. implement the plan. Again, none of these steps should be rushed, but this one is especially important. Search engines are increasingly looking for quality content that is useful to searchers. This page is not full of spam or ads full of keywords that are only useful for you. If you want to buy traffic instead of just trying to get "free" organic search traffic, consider PPC.
Step 7: Optimize your keywords
In practice, steps 6 and 7 should be intertwined. Optimize content instead of applying optimizations as they are created. Now create a list of the keywords you created in step 2. Use these keywords as much as possible in your content, but don't sound like a crazy robot. Note that there are many "invisible" places in keywords. This is not about using white text on a white background or anything that violates Google's guidelines. It means something like the name of the image file. If users aren't looking for these, they won't show up, but they can help boost your keyword rankings.
For a complete list of on-page optimization factors, see SEOmoz's guide to the "perfect" page. Another good tip is to copy the Wikipedia page. Wikipedia pages have good on-page optimization.
It's a good idea to do a quick double check of your keyword research before hitting publish. Your content may have evolved over the course of development and creation, and you need to make sure there is still consistency between your keywords and your content.
Check out our free download: 25 Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Website
Step 8: Publishing
It's (finally) time to get your content out there. Depending on the type of content, you may need to plan this step carefully. This isn't usually considered for evergreen content, but it can be important for content related to news, events, or trending things. We may also need to coordinate with internal PR and other stakeholders, for example, when launching content related to new products and services.
Step 9: Advertise
This step is critical and should be done immediately after publication. In fact, for large content, it would be nice to be able to do media before publishing the work. Make sure you do what you can to get your content seen by as many people as possible before it ranks for your keywords.
Share content through your business social accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.). If possible, do this from your personal account as well.
Use social buttons or widgets on your site to encourage independent sharing – make it easy for your readers and viewers to stay in the loop. They are more likely to tweet or share articles with the click of a button.
Build links to your content – Whatever the future of PageRank, link building is still a huge part of SEO (even if it's the most annoying part). If you want to learn more about link building, check out our blog archive on this topic.
Getting page views and social shares will help you link and help you rank.
Step 10: Analysis
It's not over yet. The web is a living medium and it's never too late to optimize your content. Check your keyword rankings manually (sign out to make sure you're not getting too personalized results) or use our rank check tool. Also, use analytics to see what keywords your content is actually ranking for. It may not be the exact keyword you originally targeted. After a few weeks, if it's not ranking for the right keywords, there's more to do.
- Really optimized
- As expected, high quality
- It really looks like it
It's also possible that the keywords you've chosen are too competitive and you should lower your targets. Try targeting less competitive keywords until you build more power.
This is it! This is the process we follow to rank for hundreds of search marketing related keywords. Whatever your position, you can use the same process. Let's begin!
